Comment by gjsman-1000
7 hours ago
So if I'm understanding correctly:
1. There was a leak of the pre-announcement
2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral
3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
[Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead
4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early
5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown
Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.
> 3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.
Which seems to be someone bullshitting with AI and had nothing to do with the exploit in question.
That same user wrote a followup tweet last night asserting that their POC wasn't ready to do an exploit in the wild https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137
Or maybe the anime girl video was an edit someone else made on top of an otherwise normal Calif video.
Still not great though.
Unbelievably the anime girl video was the official version from Calif.
https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
The video got taken down by a copyright claim from Sony Music Entertainment. Unthinkable levels of unprofessionalism by Calif.
Not really sure if 3 is correct. Might have been Calif leaks the video -> it goes viral -> people make PoCs based on the video -> Chainguard releases the binary because there seem to be credible PoCs out there (that are not just the Shigure Ui video).